"The award allows us to grow our in-house computational and data infrastructure to accelerate and facilitate these new modeling capabilities," says Hill, who specializes in Earth and planetary computational science. Increased fidelity and algorithmic sophistication in both biological and fluid dynamical component models and forays into new statistical analysis approaches, leveraging big-data innovations to analyze the simulations and field data, have grown inexorably. In response to increases in model complexity and resolution over the course of past decade since the project’s inception in 2007, computational demands have ballooned.
The Darwin Project, an alliance between oceanographers and microbiologists in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and the Parsons Lab in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was conceived as an initiative to “advance the development and application of novel models of marine microbes and microbial communities, identifying the relationships of individuals and communities to their environment, connecting cellular-scale processes to global microbial community structure" with the goal of coupling “state of the art physical models of global ocean circulation with biogeochemistry and genome-informed models of microbial processes." MIT Professor Michael " Mick" Follows and Principal Research Engineer Christopher Hill, both affiliates of the Darwin Project, were therefore delighted to learn of their recent Simons Foundation award, providing them with enhanced compute infrastructure to help execute the simulations of ocean circulation, biogeochemical cycles, and microbial population dynamics that are the bread and butter of their research. The simulations of plankton populations made by Darwin Project researchers have become increasingly computationally demanding. Now, an award from the Simons Foundation will give researchers from MIT's Darwin Project access to bigger, better computing resources to model these communities and probe how they work.
Microbes mediate the global marine cycles of elements, modulating atmospheric carbon dioxide and helping to maintain the oxygen we all breathe, yet there is much about them scientists still don’t understand.
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